All services apart from email and IM can be accessed with rival account details

Until now, web users needed to sign-up for a Yahoo-specific username and password to access services such as its news pages and online games. While this does not take a long-time, some web users see it as a nuisance. However, Mike Kerns, Yahoo's vice president of social and personalisation, said the new approach make it even easier for new users to use Yahoo.

Yahoo said it had already been trialling the approach, by allowing web users to sign in to Flickr, its photo-sharing service, using their Google IDs. Facebook and Google IDs will work across all Yahoo services, apart from Yahoo email and instant messenger.

"Facebook is a big property that people are using to be social with their friends," Kerns told Total Telecom."Yahoo is embracing that trend."

The move will mark the first time a large newt firm has accepted rival login IDs across the whole of its system.

"Yahoo has to do something to reverse the trend lines," Gartner analyst Ray Valdes told Total Telecom .

"They are redefining a new role for themselves as the Switzerland of the web."

Yahoo plans to allows web users to login with details from other web services such as Microsoft, Twitter and AOL later this year.